


Praevaricor

by Nakirikiri (Waterfoo)



Category: Naruto
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crack Treated Seriously, Domestic Fluff, Fluff and Crack, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, M/M, Mutual Pining, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, Uchiha Sasuke Returns to Konoha
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-20
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:55:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21871822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Waterfoo/pseuds/Nakirikiri
Summary: They rebuild. Some things stay the same, some things are very, very different. This would have been a lot easier if Kakashi had just taken the god damn hat.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura & Uchiha Sasuke & Uzumaki Naruto, Tsunade & team 7, Uchiha Sasuke/Uzumaki Naruto
Comments: 11
Kudos: 31





	1. Naruto has a Plan

The clean up and rebuild of Konoha is, in ninja fashion, a fight every step of the way. The clan heads bicker like the children Tsunade remembers them as — petty things like ceremony, or land division, or whoever said this-and-that about them last meeting. It doesn’t seem to matter how often she knocks their heads together, it never stops. She wishes Kakashi hadn’t rejected the hat. She massages a growing tension head ache at the base of her skull, sitting at her desk in the late afternoon of a warm spring day.

No heir, council members at each other’s throats and yet this is the least of her problems. The papers denying Sasuke Uchiha his rights as clan head sit on her desk, neatly clipped together and ready for her seal.

Naruto chooses that particular moment to come flying head first through her open window. He lands, tumbles a little, and springs up with his hands on his hips. “You can’t let them do this to him, granny!” A nerve in her face jumps at the nickname. Lord, but gossip gets around quickly in this accursed village.

“And what exactly am I letting?” Tsunade hedges.

“They’re saying Sasuke can’t go home. Please, we have to help him!” Ah. Well, no one could blame her for hoping.

Tsunade picks up a pen and starts scratching away at some paperwork. “Naruto, this is out of my hands right now. His clan grounds have been claimed by the state. Reformation comes first.”

“But, but you’re the Hokage, there must be something.”

Tsunade sighs, an ache stirring in her heart in the face of Naruto’s earnestness. “It would be the same for any other person. My own lands have become forfeit, as my clan laws dictate.” When Naruto seemingly opens his mouth to shoot back a denial, Tsunade interrupts. “He is, as far as we know, the last of his clan. He is unmarried, specifically, and has not passed into adulthood by his own clan laws. Konoha has few, if any, reasons to trust him regardless. I’m sorry, Naruto. I can’t bend the rules like that.”

Tsunade prays that it was enough for him to give up. Naruto frowns, contemplative. “I get it.” She releases a huff of breath she hadn’t realised she was holding. “So, if we fix all those problems, he’ll get the compound back? And his inheritance?”

“That’s—“

Naruto doesn’t let her finish. “I see! Thanks for telling me, granny! Also Sakura told me to tell you that you’re invited to dinner tonight! See you then!”

The dust cloud he leaves behind stirs up her papers, but Tsunade pays them no mind, head in her hands.

-

Sasuke checks and rechecks his supplies. He’d started packing as soon as his appeal form came back stamped in deep red. It was always too much to hope for, that he would be able to return to his lands. The submission of the appeal had been a courtesy the old woman afforded him, but now his time is up.

He makes it halfway to his destination before the skin on the back of his neck prickles with the feeling of being watched.

“Stalking is rude.”

A distinctly orange shadow leaps down from the roof behind him.

“Where are you headed off to?” The question is a little too innocent.

“Don’t you have a Hokage to terrorise?”

Naruto snorts. “Very funny. Want to get lunch?”

Sasuke turns away, continuing on his path. “I ate.” He can’t afford to eat out right now, anyway. Hunger is familiar to him, an old friend from his days on the run. He does not relish the thought, but he’s rather out of options. A deep rumble comes from his stomach, just as he considers making a break for the village limits.

“Right,” says Naruto, after a pause.

They race to Teuchi’s. Naruto spawns clones of himself in order to sabotage Sasuke’s progress. Sasuke threatens to tell Sai where Naruto lives, and wins in the end. Ayame greets Naruto fondly, white chefs hat perched on her head.

“On the house, for my most loyal customer,” she says.

Naruto blushes and stammers and insists that he pay her. Teuchi is out negotiating with their suppliers, and won’t be back for another week. Naruto says something to the effect of how much more business they’ll be getting, now that everyone can see Ayame from the street. Ayame smiles, indulgent and sweet, and brushes Naruto’s hair away from his face.

Sasuke hates everything a little more, says nothing, and eats.

After they finish, Naruto turns to him. “Since you aren’t busy, can we talk about something? It’s important.”

From the way he’s fidgeting, Naruto is clearly up to something. Sasuke decides he’d rather not stick around to find out. He slides off the bar stool, and with a silent nod to Ayame he heads out. Light footsteps follow in his wake, but Sasuke doesn’t turn.

“Hey, I was talking to you!” Naruto grasps lightly at his elbow, but he keeps walking. They draw curious glances from the villagers, but no one thinks to intervene, so they’re left awkwardly walk-shuffling down the street.

“Sasuke, come on, would you at least tell me where you’re going?”

Sasuke doesn’t really see how it’s any of Naruto’s business, but of course he doesn’t ask. He knows the answer already. _Because you’re my friend._

He’s sick of hearing it.

“A mission,” he lies.

“Yeah you definitely got a mission while on suspension. Try again.”

“Can we do this some other time? I’m - what are you doing?” Sasuke is resolute, refusing to look down at their hands, which are now clasped together. Somehow, Naruto had gone from clutching his arm to holding his hand.

“Isn’t it obvious? Following you. It’s not stalking if I’m right next to you!” In saying so, Naruto starts wiggling his fingers in an effort to push them through the spaces between Sasuke’s.

The afternoon is uncomfortably hot, Sasuke observes, and wishes briefly that he still had his other hand, if only to adjust his heavy travel cloak about his shoulders.

“You aren’t... you aren’t leaving, are you?” Naruto asks, almost urgently.

“No, I. Yes. Yes and no.” Sasuke pauses, swallows. “Not permanently. I’ll be around, dumb ass.”

“Oh. But, you’re leaving the village? Won’t you be arrested? I thought...”

“I won’t be going far. I’m allowed to take private contracts. Outside of the village.” Sasuke isn’t lying, he will be looking for contracts outside of the village.

“Is that where you’re going now, then?” Naruto sounds unsure, and then, as if a switch had been flipped, he says very slowly, “Sasuke, do you have a place to stay?”

Sasuke cuts his eyes off to the side. “Does it matter?” It’s as good as saying no. Everyone knows by now about the council’s decision. Without the bare minimum of a foundation of a clan and no one willing to vouch for him in the face of the village’s misgivings, his inheritance is gone.

“It matters. This is perfect!” Naruto crows, squeezing his hand.

“Excuse me?” Sasuke thinks he missed something between one sentence and the next. That, or Naruto is a lot crueler than anyone gives him credit for. He tries to disentangle himself, but Naruto pulls him bodily in a different direction. He feels the eyes of the villagers on them fully now, and considers wrenching his hand violently away, but then Naruto turns to him, exasperated smile on his face, and the thought fizzles.

“Come on. Do you have your stuff? What am I saying, of course you do, you were planning to camp out in the forest, you stubborn asshole.” Sasuke fights a swell of embarrassment. It sounds ridiculous, if he puts it like that. He lets himself get dragged away from his original destination.

“Idiot,” Sasuke says, responding to the insult purely by instinct. “What else should I do, sleep on the street?”

Naruto’s brow furrows, and like it’s the most natural thing in the world, he says, “No, stupid. Just stay with me.”


	2. Sasuke gets a clue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> accidentally hit post too early lmao oops heres the actual chapter

Naruto nearly gets punched into a wall when Sasuke finds an empty milk carton in the fridge. Again. “Sasuke!” He pleads between breathless laughs, ducking away from Sasuke’s strikes. “The look on your face!”

Three weeks and as many empty milk cartons? It’s not funny. It’s unacceptable.

“It was an honest mistake! I swear!” Sasuke could almost believe him. He throws a kunai, and Naruto means to dodge, only realising Sasuke’s true target at the last second. “Hey. HEY!” He flips out one of his own and deflects it, sinking it into the floor. “Jiraiya is off-limits! That was so low, Sasuke!” He flails his hands in the direction of the tomato plant in question, sitting perched on the windowsill.

Sasuke narrows his eyes, “Do it again and Jiraiya might just have an accident, next time you’re away.” It’s not forgiveness, of course, but Sasuke is too worn out from his mission for much else. He turns to the pot of soup on the stove, intending to ignore Naruto for the rest of the night.

Naruto takes that as permission to slink into Sasuke’s personal space. “How was it?” He roots around in the cupboards above Sasuke’s head, produces some bread, and begins to put together the beginnings of a sandwich.

Sasuke grunts. He’s always been bad at ignoring Naruto. “Fine.” He makes space for Naruto, turning on the second burner so that he can warm up the skillet.

“Yeah?” It’s open ended, the way Naruto asks it. Undemanding. Sasuke can take it as an opportunity to elaborate, or he can let it go, and really that’s half the reason Sasuke tolerates him at all, empty milk cartons aside.

“Mm. Tired.” Sasuke has a bone-deep ache, one that refuses to leave him, as though the last of his vengeful haze solidified into something heavy and rotten, and made its home in him indefinitely. Tired is putting it mildly. Some days, he thinks he could go mad with it.

“Granny says I can have access to the archives,” Naruto says, bumping their shoulders together gently. He flips the grilled cheese over and reaches past Sasuke for extra butter.

Sasuke frowns. “I told you to leave it alone already.”

Sasuke can’t see it, but he can most certainly feel Naruto rolling his eyes. “We have to look, or you won’t be able to go home. Stinking council says you need proof of clan legitimacy, then we’ll find it.”

He really hadn’t thought of looking into family trees, or scouring Fire Country for distantly related Uchiha. A lot of things sound possible when Naruto talks about them, but then, he’s always had a knack for making people just—believe. Sasuke doesn’t say anything about the other clauses. How he isn’t an adult in the eyes of his clan law, how half the village still treats him like an escaped criminal. How they blame him, rightfully, for much of the destruction and death brought upon them.

Instead, he says, “I’ve made my peace with it. Nothing’s going to change even if you magically find a long-lost Uchiha.” The soup comes to a low simmer, and he ladles it out into two bowls. He doesn’t know if Naruto already ate, but after living in the same apartment for nearly a month Sasuke has found that there’s never a time Naruto won’t eat. With one last tilt of his head, he takes them both on a tray to a low table.

“Well, not with that attitude,” Naruto grumbles, and comes to join him with their sandwiches in tow.

There is precious little room in Naruto’s modest apartment. The kitchen and living room are combined, and what space there is available Naruto has chosen to fill with things he collects on missions and pictures of the people in his life. He complains about it constantly, complains about Sasuke taking up room on his beloved couch, about his things in the bathroom and his shoes at the door. Yet when he settles down to eat, he’s almost uncomfortably near. His free hand brackets Sasuke’s side, not quite touching but so close that Sasuke feels his body heat.

Sasuke has the fleeting, manic thought that if he wasn’t using his only hand to eat, Naruto might have tried to hold it. Sasuke deeply regrets not shaking Naruto off all those weeks ago. It seemed as though once he started, he couldn’t help himself, and kept on finding all sorts of inconvenient moments to start holding onto Sasuke.

“You aren’t doing anything tomorrow, right?” Naruto says between mouthfuls, “Come with me. We’re laying down some foundations in the lower-east civilian district.”

“Somehow I don’t think I’d be welcome.” Sasuke tries his best to ignore the staring, and the gossip, but it’s hard to ignore the pity. He would have preferred outright scorn, but many who saw him grow up in the village remember him as some kind of tragic, fallen son of a long-gone clan. That, above everything, makes his skin crawl.

“What, you think they’re lining up to see me? I’ve been chased off of at least five construction sites.”

Sasuke turns, stares blankly. “Really.”

Naruto nods, and says, uncharacteristically quiet, “I scare them, I think. We did a lot of damage, y’know? All of us shinobi, but I... I did more than my fair share.”

“Stupid. You saved them all. They should be grateful.” Naruto could be the best thing to happen to this village, if they give him the chance. Sasuke knows this for a fact.

Naruto smiles just a little. “Dumb ass. We saved them,” he corrects, “And look how they treat you. Sasuke—it’s not about being welcome or not, I just want to help. It’ll be fun.”

Sasuke sets his spoon down and stares at a scuff mark on the wall, a remnant of a fight they’d gotten into the week prior. He hasn’t considered fun a defining factor in his decision making since he was a child. There is a high possibility that Maito Gai will show up, given that he’s one of the chief coordinators of the reconstruction effort and he and Naruto get along famously, which is a dreadful prospect. He absolutely hates crowds.

“Okay,” he says before he can stop his traitorous mouth.

“Really? That’s awesome! I’ll wake you up in the morning. We’re going to try and get the bulk of the work done before noon, when the heat starts getting bad. There’s drinks after as well, they do a big fire and bring snacks!” And fuck everything, but Naruto is too close, grinning, somehow having managed to snatch up Sasuke’s hand.

He wants to ask; what is this? He wants to ask; why are you doing this? He says, “You have soup on your chin.” Naruto yelps and lets go of Sasuke’s hand to scrub at his face with the sleeve of his shirt. Sasuke makes a disgusted noise in the back of his throat.

Naruto grins. “What? It’s laundry day tomorrow, anyway.”

Naruto breaks his word and ends up sleeping through his first two alarms the next day. Sasuke wakes him by dumping a basketful of wet clothes on his head. They make it to the site just in time for Gai to flex majestically at the sunrise.

“We haven’t requested more ninja,” says a woman in a hard hat. She’s civilian, Sasuke notes, but has no trouble barking orders at chuunin, who she should be terrified of. Another construction worker whispers frantically in her ear, and she darts her gaze to Naruto and Sasuke. No amount of beautiful manly tears from Gai could stop this woman if she decided to kick them out.

She squints at them and jabs a finger at Naruto. “How many times do I have to tell you to clear off? I won’t have troublemakers on my watch.”

“Aw, don’t be like that, Tamaki!” Naruto whines, drawing out the last syllable. “I’ll be good this time I promise!” Naruto might not be in the Hokage’s offices, but it seems he’s found a different old woman to annoy.

”And who said you could bring company?” Tamaki growls, and pokes Naruto in the side. Naruto acts as if he’s been impaled, for all the strength she might have put into it. Sasuke likes her a lot.

She huffs and grouches, and they get assigned to a team anyway. Gai flaps his arms and cries. It’s more manual labour and chakra intensive construction-style jutsu than all of Sasuke’s recent missions combined, but rather than tired he feels energised, abuzz with something he hasn’t felt in a long time. He waits for the exhaustion to seep in, the terrible aching emptiness that chases him even in his dreams. It doesn’t come.

“This used to be an orphanage,” Naruto says into his beer, hours later. “I grew up here, heard about it going down ages ago. I thought I’d feel something, seeing it all—like this.”

“And do you?”

“We didn’t have time between one catastrophe and the next,” Naruto continues as if Sasuke hadn’t said anything.

Sasuke has seen whole neighbourhoods levelled, untouched since their destruction years ago, presumably.

“Too many resources tied up in the fight. Why waste them in rebuilding places only for them to be destroyed next time we go to war?” Naruto says, “But we’re doing it now, aren’t we? Because when people—people look at Granny Tsunade, they know they’re going to have peace.” He laughs, disbelieving, “We were so sure of ourselves, Sasuke. We nearly killed each other for the chance to change things. And she’s just... doing it.”

Tsunade is the best of them, he thinks privately. Broken by the same system that destroyed Sasuke, but she came back and she’s trying, and under her care Konohagakure is being dragged kicking and screaming back to life. “Big shoes to fill,” Sasuke adds.

Again, Naruto laughs, too oddly pitched to be one of mirth, “Yeah. I want to help. It’s all I’ve really wanted to do for a while now. There are kids who have no parents, and nowhere to go. This place is important.” He always wants to help, though, that’s not an answer to Sasuke’s original question.

“But?” Sasuke prompts, taking a drink.

“But it was never my home,” Naruto finishes. He’s looking directly at Sasuke as he says it, and shit, he’s got his hand on Sasuke’s knee and it’s all Sasuke can do not to spit out his beer.

Sasuke swallows, and coughs. “It’s getting late.”

“It’s only seven.” Sasuke knows that. All the same, he stands and bids the group of construction workers goodbye with a quick nod, and earns a shrewd look from Tamaki. He doesn’t check to see if Naruto follows. He hears, “Oh! I guess we’re leaving. I’ll see you later guys, see you Tamaki! And thanks for the drinks!”

“Ha! Tell your boy he’s welcome back here any time if he’s willing to babysit you!”

_Your boy._

Sasuke isn’t anyone’s anything. Turning around to correct her would mean facing Naruto, however, which is not an option. He dashes off onto a nearby rooftop. He doesn’t realise his breath is coming too fast until he’s at Naruto’s door and struggling with the keys.

They’re cold and slippery in Sasuke’s hand, and no matter how hard he tries he can’t seem to get a grip on them for long enough to unlock the door. He thinks about breaking in, since he knows his chakra is keyed into Naruto’s wards, but he also knows Naruto would be upset by that and squashes the thought. It’s disturbing, now that he thinks about it, uncomfortable swell low in his belly, that he would go out of his way to avoid something like that.

Sasuke drops the keys for the third time and slams his hand against the door, cursing.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Comes a curious, low voice. It’s Naruto, it’s always him.

Sasuke rounds on him. “No,” he bites out.

“Sasuke,” Naruto steps forward, humour dropping away, “What’s going on?”

“You! That’s what’s going on,” Sasuke says. He pushes a frantic hand through his hair. “What is the matter with you? Why, why...” He can’t finish the sentence, momentum lost as soon as he found it.

“I don’t understand, I thought today went okay?” And there, the hand holding thing, it’s like any time Sasuke looks away, some part of him will suddenly be attached to Naruto.

“Stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“This!” He holds up their clasped hands, shaking them. “What do you think you’re doing? Everyone thinks, everyone is saying...”

Naruto has the guts to laugh. “Oh, is that all? Sasuke you scared me! I thought you were sick or something. Or angry at me.”

“I am angry at you, dumb ass.”

“Why?”

So many reasons, not least of which is staring them both in the face. Sasuke says, “I’m not your boy, I’m not your anything.”

This is one of those moments where Sasuke knows he’s missed some critical thought process that went on in Naruto’s head, because just like all those weeks ago, Naruto answers his anger casually with, “Well, obviously, that was the whole point—I have to woo you.”

“I. You what?” Sasuke is losing his mind. He has to be.

Naruto snorts, “We couldn’t just get together, Sasuke, that would be weird.”

“Weird.”

“Yeah!” Here, Naruto lowers his voice, as if to protect from prying ears, “We have to get your lands back, Sasuke. Granny said that you have to get married, and we’re going to find your family out in Fire Country.”

Sasuke can’t follow the thread of this conversation. He thinks he has an idea, but it’s so absurd—

“I wanted to wait a while longer, but now that you’re bringing it up,” Naruto says, tugging something out of his pocket and pressing it into Sasuke’s hand, “Let’s get married?”

Sasuke opens his upturned palm and finds a simple silver band, blue-green stone inlaid, hanging of a dark string of braided leather.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Tamaki has no relation to canon Tamaki who had all those cats and lived with nekobaa  
> \- the workiing title for this fic was "everyone has ptsd now haha"
> 
> reviews always appreciated!


	3. Tsunade's Got a Headache

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is more to peace than rebuilding, there is more to them than spoiled milk.

Sasuke breaks into the apartment, in the end. It’s as simple as kicking the door down. He thinks he hears Naruto calling his name, but it sounds somewhere distant, as though he is underwater.

Sasuke begins making coffee, pulling two mugs out before realising what a stupid idea that is, and then staring helplessly at the jars that Naruto bought when he moved in. They are the kind that flip open and seal shut on a hinge. Inside each of them is a small wooden spoon, also purchased around the same time. Naruto emptied his meagre pantry of seasonings and spices into these jars, along with the sugar and coffee. Only now, with the sounds of the world muffled around him, does Sasuke consider that these things are all easy to use with one hand.

Huh, he thinks, and is terribly, terribly warm at the thought.

“—suke, Sasuke? Are you sick? Hello?” Naruto insinuates himself into Sasuke’s space, speaking as he sorts the jars and slips the salt from Sasuke’s hand, replacing it with the sugar. Sasuke hums a thanks.

Sasuke tries, in a moment of sanity, to get things sorted, “I’ll move out next week. I have enough saved from my missions for a small room."

The truth is, Sasuke has had enough to move out for a week now. He doesn’t know why he hesitated. It has nothing to do with anything, not even waking up face to face with Naruto with his futon tangled at his feet, eyes screwed shut against the morning light.

  
Naruto passes Sasuke the cream he likes, and puts his hand over his mug when Sasuke goes to add a second spoonful of sugar. “What? Where’s this coming from? Didn’t you hear what I said before?”

Sasuke pours Naruto’s mug halfway and pushes it toward him without making eye-contact, “No.”

The ring sears a hole in his pocket where he’d stowed it.

Naruto takes the mug and tops it up with milk, “Thanks. You’re a shit liar.”

  
Sasuke snorts, “That’s you, stupid.”

  
“You heard me! I know you did, Sasuke. I thought you felt the same way,” says Naruto, hand drifting up to brush Sasuke’s side. Sasuke’s eyes widen, and he swallows, throat suddenly locked up. Before he can reply, Naruto barrels on, “How else do we get your lands back? It’s the best way.”

“The best,” Sasuke repeats, though his voice sounds far away. 

“Yes!” Naruto exclaims, “You have to be married or they’ll take your inheritance, and Sakura has her thing going on with, uh...” He trails off, fidgeting, “Y’know what, don’t worry about that, just know that she’s not an option.”

“And you are?” Sasuke forces out.

Naruto tilts forward, into Sasuke’s space once again. “Well, yeah. How else are we going to get time off to search for your family?”

Sasuke wants to scream, but doesn’t. “And that’s why you’ve been...”

“Remember that day at Teuchi’s, the day I asked you to move in?” Right, of course, what else would it have been about, other than this. The world blurs with the force of it, and something in Sasuke burns, humiliated. Stupid of him, really.

Sasuke says, “Yeah.”

“Then, you get it!”

And Sasuke does. “So this was your plan, court me and marry me? For the compound, for my inheritance.” A marriage for political purposes, to expedite his rightful claim to the Uchiha compound. Far from burning now, he is cold, cold, cold.

Naruto falters, then smiles, smaller this time, “Are you saying yes?”

Sasuke knows what he should say.

There are too many confounding factors, too many awful, secret things lurking in his heart that he refuses to look at. There is the wrenching in his gut at the notion that this is also something Naruto would give for him. Not just his life—not just dying for him—but his _life_ , the life he is living: his home, his time, his opportunity to start something real with someone he actually wants. The plan would obviously involve a quiet divorce, perhaps a few years down the line to make it believable, yet Sasuke can’t shake the feeling that if it came down to it, Naruto would stay with him indefinitely. Forever is a promise he could extract if the fancy struck, and stupid, loyal, blind Naruto would keep to it.

Sasuke knows what he should say.

Something along the lines of “Fuck no, not in a million years,” or “Thank you, but no," would probably do the trick. It is an awful, selfish thing that knots at his throat that makes him say, “Guess I am.”

Somewhere in the fog of the rest of the night, Sasuke is coaxed to bed, and _boy_ does that ring different now that he has agreed to the marriage. This is their bed now, not just Naruto’s only futon. The first night, there had been a small argument about sleeping arrangements, in which Naruto had insisted that Sasuke take the futon while also whining that Sasuke couldn’t just leave him out in the cold.

The obvious compromise had been to share, and with both of them busy on assignment, there simply hadn’t been time to purchase another one. This is what Sasuke tells himself, blinking away sleep the next morning as he watches Naruto burrow into his pillow. Morning light glances off his eyelashes, just so, and Sasuke itches with the urge to move. It doesn’t much matter what Sasuke wants, however, as it seems that Naruto has captured his hand in the night. He examines his scarred fingers, trapped between Naruto’s own, and breathes a single deep breath, stirring the small hairs that fall over Naruto’s face.

“Tickles,” Naruto mumbles, and wrinkles his nose.

Sasuke freezes, just for a second, before yanking his hand roughly away. “You’re awake.”

Naruto’s eyes slide open, squinting. “Stupid. Who wouldn’t be awake with that staring.”

I stare every morning, Sasuke does not say. “Why didn’t you say?” He asks instead.

Naruto’s eyes dart away. “Dunno. C’mon, m’hungry.”

Naruto means he’s asking for breakfast, since he can’t cook worth a damn.

Sasuke slides away and sits up to shrug his slippers on and begin their day. It’s around here where it hits Sasuke that they’ve been doing a strange pantomime of a relationship for weeks now, as though Naruto had planned for this outcome the entire time. The public outings, the hand holding, the sheer domesticity of it all had simply been a ploy to make the village, and by extension the council of elders, believe that they were in a relationship, possibly on their way to being engaged.

And it’s bittersweet, the idea that Naruto would go this far for Sasuke, and that it was a calculated series of gestures the entire time. He cracks five eggs methodically into a shallow pan, and can’t decide which one he hates more.

  
-

  
Peace is hard. The more of the past that Tsunade unearths in her efforts to re-establish order in the chaos following Kaguya’s defeat, the less sympathy she feels for the men who came before her. Peace chafes on her village, her people who were forcefully pulled through flames by foolish, greedy men, and then subsequently burnished by the heat of wartime. They perform their duties mechanically, clumsily, like a child trying the unfamiliar motions of a new kata. It is hard, rebuilding after seemingly endless years waiting with bated breath for yet another battle to come to them. Tsunade understands this, sees it not only in the eyes of her Jounin and Chuunin, but also in the strange tentative set of her civilians’ shoulders, their hesitance in celebrations. She understands. There has not been much to celebrate for a long time. Tsunade has gone back and forth with her council for months now about finding a way to boost village morale.

Some argue that all of their resources should be dedicated to the reformation project, and any dithering would result in unsatisfactory progress, not meeting the goals they set for themselves at the beginning of this mess. Others insist on the importance of connection, of allowing the people to feel that there is something else after all this, that something is worth rebuilding. Tsunade is not so callous as to force the work on war-burdened hearts, nor is she so naive that she thinks a simple call for unity will rally a broken village. That being said, she does not expect the answer to fall, quite literally, into her lap.

She is nursing a long-cooled cup of barley tea after a quiet evening, the light gold colour of it bringing a fleeting tinge of regret for her choice to forego her singular vice during her tenure as Hokage, when it happens.

“Granny. Hey. Hey. You sleeping? Granny Tsunade?” Tsunade is not, she isn’t. She was resting her eyes, is all. Naruto blinks down at her, hands behind his back.

Tsunade smiles thinly, “My favourite headache. Wonderful.”

Naruto grins, and points to a spot on her face, “Oh, is that a wrinkle?”

“Why, you—“ Tsunade breaks off, about to whip her head to face the nearest reflective surface, only managing to catch herself with a deep breath, “Never mind. What fresh hell have you wrought today?”

“C’mon Granny! No hell, I just wanted to talk!” Naruto pauses, deliberating, and then, “Well, I came to ask something actually.”

No schemes, no bar fights, no property damage reported all day. Maybe, Tsunade thinks, they’ll go a day without Konoha’s government threatening to topple over. She relaxes, just a little. “Out with it, then. Go on.”

She fiddles with paperwork, scribbling a few lines of notes absently. Naruto shuffles closer, all the way around the desk, and still Tsunade pays no mind. Yet, just as he breathes in to speak, she feels some otherworldly sense warning her to brace for the impact of the next words.

Naruto places a large beige envelope onto her lap and steps back hurriedly. “I looked it up, and it’s said that the Hokage can perform weddings. Can you do mine?”

The ink on Tsunade’s brush-pen drips a large splotch onto her papers where it hovers poised over an incomplete sentence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have the broadest strokes of this planned out in my head (if it's still up, I'm still working on it), hope to add more to it soon but no promises! Finally vibing with the way I've written things. Thanks for your time!


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